The Poetic Vegetable Garden

Recent Articles

Strawberries are a great fruit to have in your garden. They come early and can be quite rewarding. The rabbits love them as do the birds. This year my strawberries we ravaged by rabbits. The only thing I could do was replant my boxes. In a way it was good timing, the soil needed to be amended. I found plants on sale and replanted my strawberry box with a new variety.

This is a quick knol that provides pictures to help you identify the sucker. They are often removed to focus growth on one main tomato stem and to prevent over-growth. You don’t have to remove them. Removing suckers is a method of tending your tomato plants. You will still get a ton of tomatoes.

The benefits of sunken containers are similar to raised beds. They will warm faster and you won’t be stepping on the plants root systems. They also allow you to concentrate resources and grow a variety of crops. The space between the containers gets filled with mulch. You can let vines grow over the mulch while the weeds stay under control. The keys to success are sinking the containers and opening holes in the bottoms. The plants roots will grow through the container’s holes and into the ground. This provides some security from watering issues. I use recycled black nursery containers. They are easy to cut, cheap, and black to absorb the sun.

Anyone who can dig a hole can grow a salsa garden. Imagine picking fresh wholesome organic vegetables and herbs that you grew from seeds and transplants. Now imagine turning them into the world’s best homemade salsa. Can you taste it! Growing a salsa garden brings family and friends together. It is a wonderful way to beat stress and tap your creativity on so many levels. Let’s grow, it is time to get your hands dirty.

I have read a lot of articles on tending and pruning tomatoes but they never included clear pictures. What is a sucker branch? How many leaves should you remove? I had a lot of questions that pictures would have answered. I provide the pictures in this Knol. You can see exactly what you should do to tend to your tomatoes. I also provide basic guidelines to pruning which I call the three finger method.

Slugs!. Nothing more to say. Here is one way to help manage them in the garden. A beer trap will attract and kill slugs. It won’t cure the problem of slugs in the garden but in will significanly reduce their numbers.

Raised bed gardening is something I have been doing for the last 6 years. I wouldn’t garden any other way. The benefits out weigh the minimal work and cost needed to set up a basic raised bed. A raised bed garden allows you to grow twice as many vegetables in the same space you would use if the garden bed were dug at ground level. Raise bed gardens warm quicker and can be planted sooner than flat earth gardens. They also allow you to extend the growing season.

This is my third Knol of market manipulation of oil and gasoline. Supply and demand are small factors in determing the cost you and I pay for oil and gasoline. As of today 5/23/2011 oil is under $100 a barrel, it fell from $120 a barrel about two weeks ago. Below is an AP report that talks about Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan and Stanley saying the future of oil is up this was written on 5/23/2011. We are being groomed to expect and therefore accept higher energy costs.

A fallacy is the use of incorrect reasoning to make sound arguments that create accepted misconceptions. Supply and demand are not forces that purely justify nor significantly reflect the cost we pay for oil and gas. It is important to break the rhetoric down and get to the truth. This is not about a secret scheme or conspiracy. It is about truth and cost. It is important you understand how oil and gas prices are manipulated.

Supply and demand is a lovely and quaint scapegoat for greed. The issue really isn’t whether or not the oil and energy market is manipulated. The issue isn’t how is it manipulated. The question is why haven’t changes been implemented to make manipulation more difficult. What is being done isn’t illegal. It is just shrouded by the rhetoric of good ole supply and demand.